Perpetual Chronologies

By exploring the perception of progression in post-war and contemporary art, A Journey That Wasn’t at The Broad, Los Angeles, features more than 50 multi-disciplinary works from a selection of 20 practitioners. The show asks how the intangible nature of time manifests within personal memories and whether it informs the process of image-making. Many of the featured artists, including Sherrie Levine (b. 1947), Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) and Andreas Gursky (b. 1955) who are exhibiting at The Broad, Los Angeles, for the first time question how new contexts can offer new interpretations and discourses. Ultimately, audiences are invited to consider how the rhythm of time can be manipulated and distorted by human consciousness.

Lending its name to the exhibition, Pierre Huyghe’s (b. 1962) 2006 16mm film exemplifies the exhibition’s temporal concerns; the artist presents a singular narrative, staged between Antarctica and America. Whilst searching for a rare albino penguin in the hostile icescape, time becomes an illusion as all sense of conventional life disappears. Viewers are then transported to an alternative scene drenched in a foggy orange haze in Central Park, New York. The new environment looks at the significance of figurative journeys, and looks to the limitless possibilities of simulation and the experience of duration.

Furthermore, Pine Flat Portrait Studio series (2008) by Sharon Lockhart (b. 1964) contemplates time on a humanistic level, considering the youthful population who are left behind when the adults of Sierra Nevada Mountains, California, commute to work. The posed, full-length portraits not only present the fashions of the settings, but also document a specific point in the sitter’s life. By halting the aging process, the photographs reveal how immediacy can be manipulated from the moment the shutter is pressed. The collection also hints how technological filters now function to artificially reverse time, allowing individuals to refuse a sense of progression.

The Broad, Los Angeles, Opening 30 June and showing throughout February 2019. Find out more here.